Hello in 600 Words
Hi friends,
If you’re a long-time reader, you might notice a trend; my short stories that you’ve been able to read in three minutes have gotten longer. Maybe closer to five minutes now. Or six.
When I first started out this memoir-style newsletter I thought writing the short stories would make each word count more. To an extent, that’s true. But it also limits the color of each story. I write a couple thousand words and trim it to 600. Details are cut. Sometimes that’s fine. You don’t need to know the brand of shoes I wear, or whether the day was sunny, but other times it feels like it makes the story shallow. Forced. A travel story and a moral in a cramped space. The story often loses the meaning I set out to convey.
I read back my pieces and think, this feels a little forced. A little hollow. And I dislike that.
I thought about this a lot this weekend because the story I wanted to tell felt like a re-telling of another story when I eliminated many details. I threw it in the trash. Not the physical trash, but the trash of my mind. Worthless, I deemed it.
Writers do that a lot. Deem something worthless after having spent hours or days writing something. I’ve done it with four books so far - written and trashed four novels. Worthless, for a variety of reasons but mostly because I said so.
After trashing my earlier piece, on Sunday night I wrote another and edited it yesterday morning. But it wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. And the only person who has set that 600-word-limit is me. My readers have never counted the words or let me know that 720 was too long.
So I’ve lightened up on the 600-word limit that I put upon myself back in October. My newsletter is still young and I want to be able to be a little more experimental. Not a huge amount, just varying the length of my stories.
Moving forward, my posts will vary in length. And yes, I’ll have to change the byline of my newsletter, but give me time, because “stories you can read in 12 minutes or less,” doesn’t have a great ring to it. This may also mean I spend more time writing my pieces and more time editing, and I’m good with that. I’m great with it if the story gets told how I want. As a reader, it could mean I don’t reach your inbox on Mondays, and I’m toying with the idea of pushing it back to a different weekday because it turns out Sunday night arrives and I’m scrambling like a banshee.
So, if you’ve gotten this far, thanks for being a reader. My pieces may get longer, and some might be shorter, but I’m keeping the same tone, same voice, same Sasha-writing. And I would really love if you’d buckle up and come for the ride.
Thanks for traveling with me, I’ll be back next week.
Sasha
P.S. Hey, 504 words!
Oh yeah, if you want to subscribe and get a travel story in your inbox weekly, and you’re okay with stories that might be double 600 words, please subscribe!